Reader AlbinoAsian's Myriad desktop blends custom skins, carefully styled system stats, and some well-chosen wallpaper to create one of the most drastically transformed and impressive desktops we've seen in a while.

Not only is the desktop incredible, but AlbinoAsian went above and beyond, providing a detailed history and guide to the setup:

History
I ventured into the realm of desktop customization while I was on 98se and stumbled across the invaluable resource of WinT's forums. He was king of the smooth minimal look, and would hack everything that he could. Ever since them I've always tried to make my desktop look as least "default" as possible. I like change, and I can't resist a nice minimal, yet useable look. With Vista came a whole set of new challenges though as I myself haven't yet tried to make my own Visual Style. Thankfully there is some great work being done some very clever people. The artists that come to mind are invaderjohn, sweatyfish, nindijin, dimage, and MANNiEmedic.

Details
This theme came about when I was looking back at a previous screenshot of mine when I was on XP, I was using Mirev2 - a fantastic dark minimal opensource XP Visual Style. Not long after that I discovered the BASIC (non-aero) version of MANNiEmedic's Antar VS. It was fairly close to what I was looking for. It was the first Vista VS that effectively pulled off a dark explorer window background. Invaderjohn had featured several screenshots of WIP's but he was encountering a few color issues so they got out of beta. This however did the job, just needed a good dose of the 3dcc to fix up some of the colors.

Credits
All the skins details are below, but I would like to especially give credit to MANNiEmedic for his great work on the VS, and to pepijnnuland & asuraci for their work on the mirev2 suite. Lastly to WinT, possibly the father of windows desktop customization.